Identification of perceived needs of microcomputer applications for vocational education faculty members and graduate students

Vocational-Technical Education faculty members and graduate students considering faculty positions need current microcomputer skills in order to achieve long-term success in scholarly pursuits. What microcomputer applications are being currently used by vocational teacher educators and which applications do they perceive as important? These particular questions were investigated at The University of Tennessee during the Winter and Spring of 1987. Using a researcher-generated questionnaire, data were collected from 212 vocational teacher educators at the 19 member institutions of the University Council for Vocational Education. These subjects indicated their use/non-use of 19 microcomputer applications. Additionally, they reported the perceived importance, regardless of use/non-use, of each microcomputer application on a Likert scale. The data for use/non-use were tallied and rank ordered. The data concerning perceived importance were analyzed for mean and rank ordered. Additionally the chi-square test of independence was applied to each application to determine whether or not the use/non-use of a microcomputer application was related to the perceived importance for that application. The results showed that vocational-technical teacher educators use the same core of microcomputer applications as do users in the private sector. The applications either used by the majority of the respondents, or perceived as important, included word processing, bibliographic search, DOS and system commands, statistical, desktop publishing, data base management, spreadsheet, presentation production, and networking packages. The data support the development of faculty training programs and graduate curriculum development based on these applications.